About Jason Thibeault

Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

I have opinions. So do you. You want to share them with me. I would like to do likewise. Please don't expect a platform for proselytizing that will go unchecked and unchallenged, though. Contact me via the clicky thingies under my banner.

The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember -- this is my property, not yours.

What’s better than sex?

I had to wonder: Why have these sex-devaluing surveys become so popular?

In part, it’s good business. Take a survey finding that 43 percent of Canadians would choose bacon over sex – it was conducted by Maple Leaf Foods Inc., a bacon producer. Then there’s the one sponsored by the Better Sleep Council, a creation of the mattress industry, which found that 61 percent of American adults would choose a good night’s sleep over sex. See also: a survey by mobile app company Telenav which found that — surprise, surprise – one-third of Americans would rather go without sex than their cellphone. (On a related note, Gazelle, an electronics trade-in site, found that 15 percent of respondents would rather “give up sex than go for even a weekend without their iPhone.”) Sex is the ultimate measure of desire — so why wouldn’t a company try to position its product as shockingly even more desirable?

Of course, there’s also some reinforcement of beloved gender stereotypes going on here. Some of the surveys focus in particular on women – you know, those creatures famed for hating sex. Cosmopolitan found that one in five women would sooner give up sex than Farmville (presumably the magazine will begin selling women 101 hot new ways to win at Farmville). It’s just an updated riff on the joke of “Not tonight, honey, I have a headache.”

And yet sex is what sells, strangely enough. Despite the fact that there are some asexual folks, but there are no (surviving) people who abstain from eating.

Don’t get me wrong, I would probably have to make a decision between sex and something else, any time the choice is presented, and sometimes (though rarely) sex wouldn’t win. I don’t get why the decision must be made as a binary one — or one of those surveys that say “would you give up sex for a week or Facebook for a week” when some people don’t even have computers or Facebook accounts, or no steady partner and a week is nothing. (Or a steady partner and a week is still nothing.)

What do you folks make of this phenomenon of trying to play your product up as better than sex? How would that play to asexual folks? And what do you think tops sex on your to-do list?

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About the author

Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

I have opinions. So do you. You want to share them with me. I would like to do likewise. Please don't expect a platform for proselytizing that will go unchecked and unchallenged, though. Contact me via the clicky thingies under my banner.

The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember -- this is my property, not yours.

Reminds me of the old joke about the rabbi and the priest, and the priest asks him, “just between the two of us, have you ever tried bacon? Just to see what it’s like?” And the rabbi allowed that yes, once on vacation where presumably nobody knew him, he’d had some.

“So tell me, have you ever had sex?” the rabbi asked. “Just between us, of course?” And the priest sheepishly admitted he’d wavered once early in his career with a parishioner.

I get a better night’s sleep after indulging in bacon and sex. You’re right that it isn’t binary. But bacon comes before and after sex, and in between sleep periods. Like an SlBSBSl sandwich, extra mayo.

I think you mean “What’s better than the hypothetical sex you fantasy about?”

I can think of many offers of sex that just make me cringe, ohhh sure, if I get to pick the person and assume we have chemistry and assume she is into the same thing I am then of course…whats better than sex?

I can’t speak for anyone else who is asexual, but sex just doesn’t sell to me. I simply cannot see sex as anything but a way of creating more humans, which doesn’t interest me either.

Back to the question. At the top of my list are writing sci-fi, playing or planning video games or taking photos. Or just about anything BUT sex. Especially if it’s my birthday and CERN have just announced they’ve found the Higgs boson. 🙂

As I understand it, yes, mentioning sex or using it in an ad will attract attention more than one that does not use such imagery. But that doesn’t actually translate to higher sales on that product, or even higher brand recognition. People actually are smart enough to realize that using a naked woman (because it’s almost always naked women) in an advertisement for a chocolate bar does not make it tastier. Nor does a slinky blonde (never a blond, sadly) draped across the hood make a car faster, or its gas mileage better. But because people do have that initial reaction of ‘nekkid? where?’, ‘sex sells is treated as an immutable law rather than the cheap and incomplete truism it actually is.

Well, I can’t have sex right now, so most pleasurable things are better than sex right now.
After having had wonderful sex, everything else seems better than more sex right now, too, especially a good night’s sleep.

But I’d like to see the responses they’d get if they stopped people during sex and asked them if they wanted to stop now for bacon.

I find sex a darn good thing, but I’ve been an insomniac for several decades. If I could choose right now between a sexual encounter or a prolonged deep sleep, I’d be off to Dreamland.

If, OTOH, you asked whether I’d prefer to have no sex or no sleep for several decades, the answer would be different.

I gather that medical residents who work 130 hours a week and have only every third night off often have their cake and eat it too by catching some sleep *during* the sex. Their partners don’t mind because it’s a rare occasion that they ever see the resident while s/he’s awake.

Does “sex” in this situation include masturbation? I can go for a while without having sex with someone else, but I don’t think I could give up sex with myself.

Aside from that, I don’t think sex is really that great, and I am by no means asexual. I would choose most things I like over sex. Personally, I think many people overvalue sex and spend too much fantasizing about it and trying to get it. Sex is merely sex. I think efforts to devalue sex are constructive and realistic.

My long running joke with my wife is that once when we were first dating I was about to go out on an errand, and she called me into the bedroom where she was and wanted to have sex, and I said “but I was about to go to Walgreens”

That went over well as you can imagine, I pretty quickly came to my senses

So now our code when there are other people around is “let’s go to Walgreens later”

I’m guessing the reality of these polls is that people are comparing the possibility of sex to the certainty of the alternative. I’ve gone through a dozen condoms in a weekend, and if you asked me after that weekend whether that weekend I just had was better than your product, I’d laugh in your face. If I was in the midst of a 2-year dry spell, and you asked me “sex or gummi bears” I would think about the 5-pound bag of gummi bears for $6 at Sam’s Club, and compare it to the likelihood of somehow breaking my 104-0 weekend losing streak, and I’d be happier with the bears in the hand, you know what I mean?

Ooooh, thank you so much for remembering about asexual people!
This post is funny since in the asexual community, the line that cake is better than sex is actually a common joke (I mean, it’s true for many of us, but cake as a meme is a joke).

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